@bfg

I like those two angles and the ending "...right now, clarity matters more than verdicts." JC did a great job and you should read the whole thing before you'll read my - sort of follow up rant below 😉 Finite and infinite games is good framing to separate protocol and app thinking ... but for our everyday situation I'd say 👇 I think most people asking for decentralization overindex on a thing that doesn't matter, at least, once you accept the fact that this is NOT a science project. Nobody from Merkle is here to rug you. I think they've earned that assumption long time ago. If I'd be in Dan's shoes, and I 💯 don't wanna be, as a founder, I'd do exactly the same things - i.e. I'd be very clear about the fact that this is my show and it will be decentralized when it makes sense = when I achieve my objectives of delivering good enough ROI for investors and myself. Protocol itself is useless. It's only useful if something (the app or apps) feed it new users and keep them coming back. Since nobody will just "give us users", we have to go build client(s) that bring users in somehow. - it was step 1 - Warpcast. For step 2, we can't focus on apps that play a little experimental game and depend on user acquisition from us. That's a lost game. We need apps that already have users and want to bring them here! Apps that integrate protocol into their clients. That's who I'm worried about. That's where my attention and resources flow. That also means I need control over the whole stack if I'm negotiating with companies 100x bigger than myself. Sure, we are all web3 family here. But if this is not supposed to end as a dead project after the runway is gone, we need Merkle team to run in as many directions as they need to while they try to get to a scale that is sustainable, as inconvenient as it might be for us - early users, early builders, early traders, early artists, etc. And let's be fair - if we want to, we can find (everyone here can) one or two "cozy corners" where our people on farcaster congregate. (be it a channel, mini-app, or different client) The boss is not doing what we want? Oh well, let's focus on what we can influence and let's do what we want in our small corner and see how it goes. No boss listens to us anyway - not on X, not on FB, Insta, TikTok, Lens, etc. Just saying that I'm happy Merkle team is not giving up on drastic directional changes, because many teams would be tired after 5 years of grinding in different directions. So let's work on our end, let's push what we can, let's suggest what we can, but let's not be quitters just because we don't like the latest show. 🤠

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